The market’s short-time-horizon logic now structures political engagement itself.

Evidence

Beyond the internet, the market itself supplies a still more powerful metaphorics for our hyperpolitical present. Hyperpolitics is, above all, an eminently market-friendly type of politics, in form as well as content. Markets offer exit options; by nature, they are focused on the short term. Trading algorithms know no future. As Hayek noted, the psychology of planning and mass politics were closely related: politicians would bide their time over decades; Soviet planners read human needs across multiple five-years plans; Mao, keenly aware of the longue durée, hibernated in rural exile for more than twenty years. The horizon of the market, however, is much nearer: the oscillations of the business cycle offer instant rewards to participants. Today, politicians navigate by election cycle and polling averages; citizens turn out to demonstrate for a day; influencers petition or protest with a tweet. Postpolitics may be over, but its successor would be unrecognizable to a time traveler from the early twentieth century. — Anton Jäger, Hyperpolitics, 60

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the reader’s core thesis: market-borne exit options and short horizons explain why politicization fails to convert into organized force.
• QUESTION: Jäger inverts Hayek — Hayek linked planning to politics, but Jäger claims the market supplies hyperpolitics’ grammar. Worth checking how he handles this appropriation.